view mercurial/helptext/filesets.txt @ 47072:4c041c71ec01

revlog: introduce an explicit tracking of what the revlog is about

Since the dawn of time, people have been forced to rely to lossy introspection
of the index filename to determine what the purpose and role of the revlog they
encounter is. This is hacky, error prone, inflexible, abstraction-leaky,
<insert-your-own-complaints-here>.

In f63299ee7e4d Raphaël introduced a new attribute to track this information:
`revlog_kind`. However it is initialized in an odd place and various instances
end up not having it set. In addition is only tracking some of the information
we end up having to introspect in various pieces of code.

So we add a new attribute that holds more data and is more strictly enforced.
This work is done in collaboration with Raphaël.

The `revlog_kind` one will be removed/adapted in the next changeset. We expect
to be able to clean up various existing piece of code and to simplify coming
work around the newer revlog format.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D10352

Mercurial supports a functional language for selecting a set of
files.

Like other file patterns, this pattern type is indicated by a prefix,
'set:'. The language supports a number of predicates which are joined
by infix operators. Parenthesis can be used for grouping.

Identifiers such as filenames or patterns must be quoted with single
or double quotes if they contain characters outside of
``[.*{}[]?/\_a-zA-Z0-9\x80-\xff]`` or if they match one of the
predefined predicates. This generally applies to file patterns other
than globs and arguments for predicates. Pattern prefixes such as
``path:`` may be specified without quoting.

Special characters can be used in quoted identifiers by escaping them,
e.g., ``\n`` is interpreted as a newline. To prevent them from being
interpreted, strings can be prefixed with ``r``, e.g. ``r'...'``.

See also :hg:`help patterns`.

Operators
=========

There is a single prefix operator:

``not x``
  Files not in x. Short form is ``! x``.

These are the supported infix operators:

``x and y``
  The intersection of files in x and y. Short form is ``x & y``.

``x or y``
  The union of files in x and y. There are two alternative short
  forms: ``x | y`` and ``x + y``.

``x - y``
  Files in x but not in y.

Predicates
==========

The following predicates are supported:

.. predicatesmarker

Examples
========

Some sample queries:

- Show status of files that appear to be binary in the working directory::

    hg status -A "set:binary()"

- Forget files that are in .hgignore but are already tracked::

    hg forget "set:hgignore() and not ignored()"

- Find text files that contain a string::

    hg files "set:grep(magic) and not binary()"

- Find C files in a non-standard encoding::

    hg files "set:**.c and not encoding('UTF-8')"

- Revert copies of large binary files::

    hg revert "set:copied() and binary() and size('>1M')"

- Revert files that were added to the working directory::

    hg revert "set:revs('wdir()', added())"

- Remove files listed in foo.lst that contain the letter a or b::

    hg remove "set: listfile:foo.lst and (**a* or **b*)"